Top funds by 3-year returns

To take stock of the equity markets' winners, we cast a wide net across industries and cap size. Any mutual fund or ETF that had at least $500 million in assets was considered. Of those funds, here we list those with the 20 highest three-year annualized returns.

The average three-year return on the list is 19%, compared to 11% for the S&P 500. The average one-year gain was 16.4%, compared to 11.6% for the S&P benchmark. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of diversification among the top funds as technology dominated the gains in recent years. As always, we included expense ratios for each fund, which ranged from about a third of percentage point to 1.5%. The average was 76 basis points.

Scroll through to see the top funds in the past three years. All data from Morningstar.